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Parasite 1997-1998: "It's always while looking at the part that the whole is seen to be moving"

PARASITE 1997-1998: “It’s always while looking at the part that the whole is seen to be
moving”
by
Rebecca Matalon
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
August 2013
Copyright 2013 Rebecca Matalon

This essay examines the activities of the New-York-based artist-run organization Parasite (1997-1998). Dedicated to proposing alternate economies for project work—a mode of contemporary artistic practice that is often interdisciplinary, context-specific, and involves labor in excess of material production—Parasite aimed to create support structures outside of the museum and commercial gallery system. While motivated by concerns particular to the 1990s, for Parasite, project work related primarily to a history of minimalist, conceptualist, post-studio, and site specific critiques of the 1960s and 1970s. The revolving group of twenty-five artists included Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Michael Clegg, Renée Green, Ben Kinmont, Christian Marclay, Nils Norman, and Jason Simon, among many others, During a period of less than two years, Parasite sustained a private practice of weekly meetings; organized programs in the form of artist lectures, roundtables, screenings and exhibitions at two Lower Manhattan art organizations; and built an archive of historical and contemporary materials related to project work. The recent recovery of this archive, officially named the Parasite Document Collection, has allowed for an in-depth reconsideration of the activities of the relatively unknown self-organized collective. ❧ Looking to Parasite’s three primary aims of “supporting, documenting, and presenting” project work as self-defined categorizing frameworks, this essay addresses the group’s initial private self-conception as an artists’ advocacy group (support), the Parasite archive and the history traced therein (document), and the group’s re-staging of Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed as Art (1966) in 1998 (present). This study asks, what modes of production and reception did Parasite propose and how might these modes correspond and/or diverge from dominant forms of critical interpretation and valuation of artistic works?

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PARASITE 1997-1998: “It’s always while looking at the part that the whole is seen to be
moving”
by
Rebecca Matalon
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
August 2013
Copyright 2013 Rebecca Matalon